“Should we do this in English? Or would you prefer Spanish? I know your Spanish is excellent.”
“No, no, your English is much better than my Spanish-let’s just stick to English.”
“Are you sure? I don’t want to make you work too hard.”
“I’m positive. It’s easier this way. Really.”
(A single human sneeze can travel at speeds exceeding 100 miles per hour, though in a digital call, the only thing traveling that fast is the immediate, creeping sense of social obligation.)
By the time the actual meeting begins, we have already spent forty-two seconds performing a linguistic minuet-a formal, stylized dance-that has nothing to do with the quarterly safety audit. As a safety compliance auditor, I spend my life looking for friction in systems, the tiny snags where a gear might catch or a protocol might fail.
Usually, I’m looking at physical things like pressure valves or floor-load capacities (the maximum weight a floor can safely support), but lately, I’ve become obsessed with the friction of the “Start.” I’m especially grumpy about it today because I accidentally hung up on my boss -my thumb slipped on the glass while I was trying to mute a cough-and the resulting silence was so awkward I considered changing my name and moving to a different hemisphere.
The Logistics of Hierarchy
We treat the choice of a shared language as a minor piece of